a foodie victory

While watching "60 Minutes" the last several weeks I couldn't help but smile. Two weeks ago featured local food movement icon Alice Waters and this past Sunday included a White House tour with President Obama in which he referenced the vegetable garden that his wife is planting. As most of the blog followers know, other than being a culinary school graduate and proclaimed foodie, I am also pretty involved in the local food movement as a supporter of sustainablly grown/raised foods, most directly through regularly shopping at the farmers market and most recently through working for the non profit organization Organic School Project. And of course all of this influences the food I choose to serve little Eddie.

Eddie started on solid foods when he was 5 1/2 months, at the beginning of February - clearly not the greatest time of year for food. Not much is in season right now in our hemisphere, let alone the Midwest. I planned his menu, or more so the scheduled introduction of foods, partially based on suggestions in a book called "Super Baby Food" given to me by my sister's friend Mary whom is a pediatric nurse, but also based on what was in season and available locally. Luckily a lot of the first foods that should be introduced to babies are root vegetables (sweet potatoes, carrots) or storage vegetables like winter squash, which are readily available now. Some of the grains, including oats and barley, can also be found locally - we recently bought some whole rolled oats from a farm located outside of Kankakee, IL called Three Sisters Farm and they were fabulous. Unfortunately some foods will never be available within a 500-mile radius of Chicago: organic bananas come from Columbia and avocados currently come from Mexico.

We went to the farmers market this past weekend and got some great meats and cheeses, but sadly the only vegetables available were potatoes...and some greenhouse sprouts. But winter is surely on its way out and before we know it the beginning of spring will be marked with the first asparagus...I can't wait. I want Eddie's first taste of asparagus to be of a crisp, tangy and sweet tiny bud from Mick Klug's farm and not of the woody stalks from some South American country. I want this for two main reasons: taste and politics. Yes, you can buy asparagus right now at the grocery store, but you will sacrifice taste for the convenience of having them now. Asparagus' lifespan as an edible botanical is very short-lived: the minute it is cut, it begins to decompose quickly. So imagine what a several hour airplane ride to simply transport it from the southern hemisphere to our grocery stores does to the tasty veggie? And then think about all the fossil fuels used to transport it. On top of that, think about the underpaid laborers in that South American land whom harvest those stalks. This is why I'd rather wait all year for asparagus and buy them from farmers, from the people who actually tended the soil and harvested the plant.

I am ready for spring. I am ready for spring not only for the farmers market's bounty but also because I have vowed to convert some of our backyard into an herb and vegetable garden partially for my own selfish desire to have the freshest product possible for meals, but also for little Eddie to grow up with recognition of and an appreciation for fresh food...along with all the forms of life from ant to butterfly that ocompany the garden. And I really want a compost heap - we produce way too much waste that ends up in the black garbage bins in our alley (and god knows where those end up) that could be put back into the land and help fertilize our garden.

And so it is in this light that I feel a tremendous sense of hope for the future - the last vegetable garden, a.k.a. Victory Garden, at the White House was planted by Eleanor Roosevelt to symbolically reduce pressure on the public food supply. Michelle Obama (with urging from Alice Waters, by the way) decided to plant an organic vegetable garden in a similar symbolic fashion, acknowledging the importance of healthy, locally grown food and the use of the garden as a classroom, an educational tool for youth - a concept which was at the heart of the mission of the Organic School Project. Our founder, Greg Christian, firmly believed that the only way to get kids to even try new foods was to grow them, and so we worked to get gardens into Chicago Public Schools. Now my life is in a way simpler...I am no longer fighting a big system to use the school garden's parsley in the school meals or trying to raise money to feed inner city kids organic food, but I am still deeply connected to those ideals in the ways I am raising Eddie. I may not be changing the lives of many for the better, but I am devoting myself to the well-being of one...and that feels pretty good too.